Good hello Slippers (or Slipmatians, which ever rocks your boat)!
After 9 months of active testing, hundreds of hours of work and thousands of hours of live streams, I’m very proud and happy to announce that our Native Video Encoder – Frankie – is now generally available for all DJs!
About Frankie the DJ Streaming Engine
If you’ve streamed on YouTube, Twitch or Facebook, you already know the deal: fire up your favorite streaming software, put in the ingest URL and streaming keys, tweak some settings and off you go. Problem is, most streaming platforms are designed to be very generic and they usually optimize video quality or latency over sound quality. What’s worse, many of them penalize DJs for promoting other peoples music.
For DJ live streams, there are only two important aspects: smooth uninterrupted streams and superb audio quality. This is why we built Frankie; it’s a purpose-built engine, designed from the ground up to be extremely good in one very specific thing: DJ live streams.
Frankie has been in development since early January 2019. We’ve spent a lot of time testing and tweaking it, and today we’re offering it for free to all Slipmat DJs. Check out Setting up Fankie to get going!
Our plan is to get Frankie out of beta in the coming months and then open source the code so everyone can build their own streaming server with it to use with Slipmat or wherever. Slipmat is not run by any company so we don’t unfortunately have the money for offering everything for free, but we’ll offer affordable paid plans for those of you who don’t have the expertise or the interested in running your own servers. Meanwhile, please test Frankie out – it’s on us! 
Life after Chew
One of the oldest competing platforms, Chew.tv recently closed its doors after being sold to BandLab. I already wrote a long welcoming post for the Chew family where I explained how I felt very mixed feelings about this. It’s nice to see happy buyouts and lots of new users here but on the other hand it’s also very important to have serious competition.
I firmly believe that DJ streaming is here to stay and we’ll be live streaming our sets for the end of times, but at the moment the streaming service landscape looks like scorched earth. Most DJs are streaming on the very big platforms like Facebook where they only get random driveby-listeners and almost no analytics or other data, not to mention any means to reach the audience without paying lots of money for visibility. Then there’s the copyright-mafia that extorts DJs for actually actively promoting other peoples music for free. It’s all very sad and unhealthy.
Slipmat is a community of DJs and music lovers, we want to stay open, stay current and fight against bad ideas. We want to give voice to talent instead of money and offer more tools for DJs to engage and reach their fanbase.
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: if you take 5 minutes away from your daily time on the toxic platforms like Facebook and connect with people here instead, you will literally make the world a better place!
All the other stuff!
We’ve had fewer updates since the last beta but the changes were so big that we decided to jump from 25 to 30.
Full Release Notes
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New: our native video engine Frank is now in beta and a trial hardware has been set up for all Slipmat DJs to use.
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Enhancement: event creation form has been tweaked a bit and is now more intuitive and shows clearer error messages.
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Enhancement: mobile Web app has again had lots of love since the last release. We’re also not calling it alpha nor mobile app, but it’s now the future of Slipmat; it’s Slipmat Beta!
- Mobile-friendly mentions support with @-character (type @, then scroll with arrow keys, then tap with a finger or hit TAB or spacebar to select)
- New @-button for triggering mentions and also submit-button near the chat text input field to help the usage on mobile devices.
- Newly redesigned user profile card that shows all kinds of details for each logged in user in the event
- New less distracting colors in the chat and in the main UI
- New user list view
- Request app has been fully redesigned and works also on the beta live page.
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Bugfix: there was an issue with event timezones being shown wrongly. Apologies for everyone who got bitten by this and thanks to @Phoole and others for helping to diagnose and fix the issue. This affects a huge portion of the site so this fix is just a first of many but so far homepage, DJ admin page and upcoming event detail pages have been fixed. More fixes will come later.
Finally
We’ve seen lots of new DJs and listeners here on the site and I’m super happy of the great atmosphere there has been in the events. As a reminder, if you still haven’t, please read our Code of Conduct and Community Diversity Statement - it’s important that everyone feels welcome and understands that we do not tolerate any bad behaviour here
We’re planning a live community event for all Slippers in October. There’s a vote open for suitable times and only a handful of you have voted, please vote: Vote: best time for live Community Event?
Lastly, very special Thank You for everyone who has been playing events, bringing in new listeners, reporting bugs and participating here on Backstage. Thank You! 
Now, let’s get back to the events! Happy Streaming!
